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A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.

John Banville

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John Banville
Age: 78
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Depends
Others
Nothing
Much
Men
Depend
Integrity

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I am the worst judge of my books.
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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power I lied to lie. It was a way of living lies are life's almost-anagram.
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The first thought that occurred to me, that night when I heard the chairman of the jury announce my name, was, Just think how many people hate me at this moment. Naturally, I wanted to annoy those people even further by being arrogant.
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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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Ian McEwan is a very good writer the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.
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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralysed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.
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I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
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With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.
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Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning.
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I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
John Banville